George Osborne's budget painted a largely joined-up narrative for local government. The focus was almost entirely on attracting and sustaining private enterprise and jobs into our cities and into some of our most deprived communities.

Simplification of planning rules to support sustainable investment is key to attracting investment and Communities and Local Government will be publishing proposals next week.

Further investment includes ultrafast broadband for 10 cities including Liverpool and Birmingham, and £1.2bn of infrastructure spending to support business development in Manchester. The mayor of London will receive an additional £70m to support job creation as well as further incentives for investment in the Royal Docks project, which has already seen significant investment.

The chancellor reiterates support for 24 enterprise zones and was keen to emphasise that Chinese investment was "pouring in" to the enterprise zone in Liverpool. New enterprise zones were announced for both Wales and Scotland.

A further £150m was announced to support tax increment financing. Linked with the announcement about rail investment in the north-west it is clear that the chancellor is attempting to brush off charges of an economic policy based on business development in the south-east and public sector cuts in the north.

Osborne also appears keen to break the dependency culture on the public sector that has been a feature of many deprived communities where, supported by national pay rates, it was by far the biggest employer. Veiled threats to further reduce welfare benefits, coupled with significant increases in the tax threshold, show a clear focus on making work pay.

With the investment stimuli outlined above, this is perhaps part of a drive to making sure there are sufficiently motivated candidates to take on the new jobs on offer. Regional pay can be seen far less as a cost cutting measure for the public sector and far more a clarion call for the best regional talent to want to work for burgeoning enterprises.

The chancellor's focus is clear, but careful management is needed in respect of employee relationships and ensuring that highly talented teachers, doctors and social workers are still attracted to jobs in the most challenging areas of our country.

The chancellor needs to help ensure that our regional economies move to a sustainable balance between the private and public sector and that local communities are empowered to make the choices that will influence these decisions, rather than relying on Whitehall top-down policy implementation.